“Our first night,” writes Lady Lyttelton in one of her letters, “in this house is well spent. Nobody smelt paint or caught cold, and the worst is over.... After dinner we were to drink to the Queen and the Prince’s health as a _house-warming_. And after it the Prince said, very naturally and simply, ‘We have a hymn’ (he called it a psalm) ‘in Germany for such occasions. It begins,’ and then he repeated two lines in German which I could not quote right--meaning a prayer to bless our going out and coming in.”[61] Miss Lucy Kerr, one of the Maids of Honour, insisted in her Scottish fashion on throwing an old shoe after the Queen as she crossed the threshold for the first time, and she further diverted the company by her desire to procure molten lead and sundry other charms of Scottish witchcraft to bring luck to the Royal pair. During the yachting cruise round the south coast, Baron Stockmar appears to have used his opportunities of close and intimate companionship with the Queen and her consort to note the changes that time had wrought in their characters. In his “Memorabilia” he records his impressions. “The Prince,” he writes, “has made great strides of late.... He has also gained much in self-reliance. His natural vivacity leads him at times to jump too rapidly to a conclusion; and he occasionally acts too hastily; but he has grown too clear-sighted to commit any great mistake.” “And the Queen also,” writes the same keen and watchful critic, “improves greatly. She makes daily advances in discernment and experience; the candour, the love of truth, the fairness, the considerateness with which she judges men and things, are truly delightful; and the ingenuous self-knowledge with which she speaks about herself is simply charming.”[62] In the autumn, too, some other German friends cheered the Queen with a visit. The Princess of Prussia, afterwards the Empress Augusta, came on a visit to her aunt, the Queen Dowager Adelaide, and in September her Royal Highness went to Windsor. The Baroness Bunsen, who was in her suite, has given us a charming picture of the happy family circle round the Queen into which she then found herself introduced. In a letter to her mother from Windsor Castle, the Baroness writes:--“I arrived here at six, and at eight went to dinner in the Great Hall, hung round with the Waterloo pictures. The band played exquisitely, so placed as to be invisible; so that, what with the large proportions of the hall, and the well-subdued lights, and the splendours of plate and decoration, the scene was such as fairy tales present; and Lady Canning, Miss Stanley, and Miss Dawson were beautiful enough to represent an ideal Queen’s ideal attendants. The Queen looked well and _rayonnante_, with that pleased expression of countenance which she has when pleased with what surrounds her, and which, you know, I like to see.”[63]